Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 is next in the ring. Generally, higher capacity drives tend to perform a little better in these tests. The ability of a controller and flash memory to deliver high IOPS also results in better rated speeds. The Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB is rated at up to 80,000 IOPS read and 150,000 IOPS write. Looking at the sequential read and write results, this Gigabyte M.2 SSD PCIe 256GB fell behind the rest of the pack. This was probably the most surprising result, especially since Crystal Disk Mark sometimes reflects similar numbers as our first two benchmarks, albeit at differing magnitudes. In the 512K section, the M.2 PCIe SSD ranked last in reads and second to last for writes. Moving to the 4K results, the Gigabyte M.2 drive read performance was behind everyone, while the write performance was just a bit closer to being competitive, despite still coming in fifth. This is again a similar story in the 4K QD32 test, with both its read and write speeds being ranked in the bottom half of these drives. From all of these tests, you can see the budget nature of the M.2 PCIe SSD, even falling behind the closely priced Toshiba RC100 240GB. Compared to the recently reviewed SATA-based SSDs, these performance numbers are much closer to these drives in performance. In addition, the M.2 PCIe SSD starts getting outclassed in the 4K and 4K QD32 tests for both read and write results.